Mary Robinson elected President of Ireland

A republic does not always change at the ballot box. Sometimes it changes in a small gesture announced from a podium, a candle set in a window, a sentence delivered in the language the state had spent seventy years not speaking aloud. The constitutional office is unchanged. The country around it is not.

THE LONG CANVASS

She is Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, born Mary Bourke at Ballina in County Mayo on the twenty-first of May 1944, daughter of the physician Aubrey de Vere Bourke and Tessa O'Donnell, the only girl among four brothers in a Catholic professional household on the western seaboard. Mount Anville in Dublin, then Trinity, then the King's Inns, then Harvard. Called to the bar in 1967. At twenty-five, Reid Professor of Constitutional Law at Trinity College Dublin. From 1969, a Labour senator, and through the seventies the lawyer who argued the cases the state did not want argued: the right to contraception, the rights of unmarried mothers, the legal disabilities of married women, the slow unpicking of an Ireland written in 1937 for someone else. Married in 1970 to Nicholas Robinson, against the quiet disapproval of a mother who would not see her wedding day. By the spring of 1990 she had been out of the Seanad a year, back in private practice, when Dick Spring asked her to stand for a presidency that Fianna Fáil had held for forty-five years without serious challenge. She agreed on the condition that she would not be the Labour candidate but an independent one, and she would canvass every county.

THE COUNT AT BALLSBRIDGE

It is twenty past eleven on the morning of Saturday the third of November 1990. The Members' Hall of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge has the autumn light of a Dublin south-side morning, high south windows, the smell of paper and tea, tally-men along the trestles with their pencils blunt by now. Three days earlier Brian Lenihan had been ahead on first preferences. Three days earlier the Tánaiste Brian Lenihan had been the obvious seventh President of Ireland, a Fianna Fáil man in the Fianna Fáil seat, the long unbroken line from Seán T. O'Kelly through de Valera through Childers through Ó Dálaigh through Hillery, the office held continuously by the party of the 1937 Constitution since 1945. Then the tape of the phone call to Áras an Uachtaráin in 1982. Then the sacking of Lenihan from cabinet by Charles Haughey on the thirty-first of October. Then the transfers. The Fine Gael candidate Austin Currie has been eliminated on the first count. The Returning Officer Walter Kirwan stands. Robinson on the second count: 817,830. Lenihan: 731,273. A margin of 86,557 votes. The Fianna Fáil grip on the office is broken for the first time since 1945. She is the first woman ever elected to it. She is forty-six years old.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE MICROPHONE

There is a corridor between the count-hall and the press-room, and a few seconds in it during which the speech in her hand is still only paper. The Constitution gives the President almost nothing to do: sign bills, dissolve the Dáil at the request of a Taoiseach who has the numbers, receive ambassadors, be ceremonially Irish in a morning coat. Article 12 was designed by a clerical lawyer in 1937 to keep the office quiet. Quietness was the point. She has been a constitutional lawyer for twenty-three years; she has taught the article; she knows what it does not permit and, more usefully, what it does not forbid. A presidency cannot legislate. It can be looked at. It can stand somewhere and not somewhere else. It can light a lamp and say what the lamp is for. The women who came out across the parishes from Letterkenny to Bantry, who put her name on doors that had voted Fianna Fáil since the Treaty, who told her on the steps of community halls that they had been waiting since 1937, are not waiting for legislation. They are waiting to be recognised by the state in the chair the state reserves for itself. The corridor is short. By the time she reaches the microphone the decision has been made: the office will be used. Not against the Constitution, with it; not against the government, alongside it; but used, every day, as a public symbolic act on behalf of an Ireland the 1937 text did not imagine and the 1990 country had become.

THE MANSION HOUSE, EVENING

That evening at the Mansion House in Dawson Street she gives the acceptance speech. She names the women of Ireland in Irish before she names them in English. Mná na hÉireann, she says, the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle rocked the system. She thanks the canvassers parish by parish. She speaks of an Ireland that includes its emigrants, the millions of Irish-born and Irish-descended who left through Cobh and Rosslare and Dublin Port across two centuries and were rarely spoken of from the office of the head of state. She announces that from her inauguration there will be a light in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin for them. A candle. A small thing. The hall understands it before she has finished the sentence.

THE OTHER ÁRAS

Across the Liffey, in the Phoenix Park, the lights are on late at Áras an Uachtaráin. Patrick Hillery, the sixth President, a Fianna Fáil man and a Clare doctor, is finishing his second term. He has held the office through the worst of the Troubles with the discretion the Constitution prefers. Tomorrow's papers will not be kind to his party. He has known since the count what is coming, and what is coming is not only a successor but a different reading of the same article. He will hand over a quiet house. He knows it will not stay quiet. The candle, when he hears about it from the speech, is a courtesy he would not have thought to extend, and an instruction he would not have thought to give. He prepares the rooms.

THE SEVEN YEARS

She was inaugurated as the seventh President of Ireland on the third of December 1990 in the Dáil Chamber at Leinster House. The candle was lit in the front window of the Áras that night and burned every night of the seven years that followed. In 1991 she crossed into West Belfast and shook hands in Catholic and Protestant communities on the same day. In 1992 she went to Somalia during the famine and came back and wept in public on RTÉ and refused to apologise for weeping. In 1993 she went to Buckingham Palace and shook the hand of Elizabeth II, the first Irish head of state to do so, five years before the Good Friday Agreement made the gesture diplomatically obvious. She met the Dalai Lama in 1994 against the protests of the Department of Foreign Affairs. She went to Rwanda in 1995, the first head of state to visit after the genocide. In September 1997 she resigned the presidency three months early to take up the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which she held until 2002. Mary McAleese, her successor, kept the candle for fourteen years. Michael D. Higgins has kept it since 2011. It is the same window.

THE WINDOW

The constitutional office did not change in 1990. The text of Article 12 is the text of Article 12. What changed was what an Irish person walking past the railings of the Phoenix Park on a dark evening could see through the trees, and what they understood themselves to be looking at: a small flame on a sill, lit for the ones who had gone, lit by a country that had finally got around to saying so.